The Enterprise System Spectator

Thursday, June 02, 2016

Announcing the Salesforce.com Superlative Index

We often hear that Salesforce.com is an amazing company. But how amazing is it? The Enterprise System Spectator is proud to announce today a new metric that will be incredibly important for investors, customers, and fans of Salesforce.com everywhere: the SFDC Superlative Index™.

Through the SFDC Superlative Index, we can now quantify the awesomeness of SFDC. We do this by counting the number of superlatives used by SFDC executives in their quarterly earnings calls and analyzing the changes in the use of these superlatives over time.

Superlatives per Quarter Reaches High Water Mark

These are fantastic days for SFDC, terrific days indeed. As shown in Figure 1, SFDC executives used tracked-superlatives 97 times in the firm's most recent quarter, the greatest number in the past five quarters.

Analyzing superlatives that make up the SFDC Superlative Index provides deeper insights.

Excitement is Rising

SFDC executives are truly excited about the most recent quarter. As shown in Figure 2, we find that "excited/exciting" has now returned as the top superlative in the first quarter, after a sharp decline in the fourth quarter of FY 2016.

CEO Marc Benioff reported that he as "really excited to be here, really excited for the first quarter" and he was "really excited" about raising the company's full year revenue guidance. "This kind of accelerated revenue growth [is] something that we’re very, very excited about," he later added.

Benioff's excitement also extended to up-coming events, such as World Tour New
York, which he said is already sold out. "So we’ll be excited to see you there," he added. He also said that he was "really excited to visit with all the Salesforce customers and developers who are coming Trailhead DX."

But Benioff saved his greatest excitement for the upcoming Dreamforce conference in October.

"I know the bands that are playing. I know what’s going on and I’m [not] going
to give you too much of that yet," he said. "I can just tell you it’s going to be
the biggest and most exciting Dreamforce ever."

COO, Keith Block, also shared Benioff's enthusiasm, especially about the firm's moves in Europe. "Obviously we’ve made investments with data centers in Europe which we’re
very, very excited about, our customers are obviously excited about
that," he said.

Business is Beyond Exciting

As shown in Figure 2, SFDC executives went even further in describing developments during the quarter, using words such as incredible (23 times), huge (16), amazing (8), and outstanding (5) to round out the top five superlatives.

Early in the call, Benioff described the first quarter as the best that the firm has ever seen, "There is [sic] some incredible numbers you’re going to see including the cash flow number," he said. "We’re well positioned for another great year. This is amazing."

Block confirmed Benioff's enthusiasm. "I mean, this is an incredible company with incredible people and an
incredible set of products and customers," he said.

Not only is SFDC incredible, SFDC customers are also incredible. For example, Benioff said, "Uber, one of the world’s great innovative companies, another expansion in
the quarter, they’re an incredible innovator with off-the-chart growth." Regarding a new deal with Amazon in the quarter, Block said, "We love Amazon, we’ve got a great relationship with Amazon, they are a
huge user of Salesforce and that certainly has been a huge part [of] this
quarter as well."

In describing the firm's Sales Cloud, Benioff let loose with a string of incredibles:

"I mean we know that there is not just a cloud, there is not just a
incredible cloud vision for Sales Cloud, not just incredible, social
vision. You all know it has been built on this incredible engagement
platform built on our Chatter core and then extended into Salesforce1. Of course it has incredible mobility, the best of any enterprise
application in the world with more mobile users gone up than any other
application that I’m aware of."

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